To celebrate their 40 years milestone, Önskefoto kicked off a special photo contest campaign. Consumers submit their favorite photos from the past which are then recreated in a modern setting. The submission which best portrays the “now and then” theme will win 4,000 Swedish Kroner worth of Önskefoto products. Not only can customers participate in the celebrations, but Önskefoto founder Carsten Johansson also took part and talked about the founding of Onskefoto in a blog post (in Swedish).

The anniversary celebrations kicked off late January and shortly after, Önskefoto was featured on the radio as local Swedish radio station organized the Fjällkalaset (mountain festival) event where 40 families could win a trip to a ski resort in the north of Sweden. Önskefoto was there to celebrate with them, and many others, with a photo booth and a showcase of photo products.

A brief history of Önskefoto

What started off as a hobby in 1975 became a company when Carsten Johansson started creating giant photos directly from a photograph without using any film, negatives or slides.

By 1983, he started to sell color enlargements with 20 employees and saw sales more than quadruple. During this time, orders were being fulfilled by old-fashioned post.

In the 90s, Önskefoto launched its website and started to sell photo calendars. However, in the early 2000s, as the digital camera changed the photo market, Carsten sold Önskefoto to Online Brands Nordic Group.

By 2011, Albumprinter, a Cimpress brand, acquired Önskefoto to grow the Swedish market.

The milestones continue for Önskefoto, as its first nationwide TV commercial was released, followed by radio in 2014.

Happy 40 years Önskefoto!

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I came away from my Cimpress World Tour and these discussions impressed with the passion for innovation, growth and customers our businesses have and what they do to entice, retain and serve customers in their markets:

• At Exagroup, they see their primary mission is to help their reseller customers grow – not only providing them with outstanding products, onboarding tools and sales kits, but also consulting on competition, markets and even segments they should target to increase market share.
• At EasyFlyer, they place no limits on customer satisfaction and differentiate themselves in customer intimacy, response time, application consulting, remediation and proactive post-delivery follow up calling.
• At Druck, they put their brand promise out there on the front page of their website – letting customers and prospects know in real time what percent of orders were shipped ahead of time, on time or late as well as giving real-time visibility into their quality management system. Moreover, they use their invoice to create trust. If customers do not like the quality of their product – they do not have to pay.
• At Pixartprinting, they entice volume and trust through a relentless focus on market price advantage, co-innovation with their vendor community and continuously testing with, learning from and being a safe harbor for their customers, no matter what.
• At Printdeal, they provide operational transparency with their Manager system and are attuned to how prospects and customers search their website in order to quickly respond with new product introductions through a network of outsourcers.
• At Albumprinter, they are innovating to reach a new population of mobile buyers of photo products by exposing their capabilities as APIs to be consumed by other app developers.

Our businesses serve different market segments and geographies with different expectations in experience, color conformance and overall quality. In fact, for those business units with a substantial (or in the case of Exagroup, exclusive) reseller population, the expectation of quality is often higher than the end customer’s expectation. As we build out our MCP and operating model to provide cost, scale, reach and selection advantages, we must also recognize that as part of their value chain, we are integral to the unique brand promise and customer experience of each of these merchants. It’s a big responsibility, but an existing one as well.

Bernie Gracy is SVP of Global Products and MCP Technology at Cimpress. He cut his teeth in the Automated Document Factory and Enterprise Software markets before coming to Cimpress in March 2015. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science and an MS in e-Commerce. In his spare time, he enjoys kayaking, hiking and camping in the great outdoors and being with family and friends.

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What do you get when you start a web-to-print company based on the promise of extreme customer service, of doing everything and anything possible to make online printing easy, fast, reliable and “hyper-trustworthy”? When every new team member is required to read the book “Delivering Happiness”, written by the founder of Zappos, a bible in terms of making the customer the center of everything a company does?  And when every team member must work at least once every month in customer service roles, talking to customers? And when you then pump up this extreme customer centricity with passion, speed and a spirit of adventure?

The answer is that you get Easyflyer, a small but rapidly growing company based in Orleans, France. The company is  fast, nimble and dreaming big, with an incredible devotion to customers that makes them stand out from the crowd in the world of online printing.

We are excited to announce that on April 9^th, Easyflyer became part of Cimpress. The acquisition supports Cimpress’ strategy of leveraging a common mass-customization platform that we take to market via a portfolio of focused brands.

Easyflyer is based about 100 kilometers southwest of Paris, with approximately 30 team members. Easyflyer was founded four years ago and wows its customers with a wide variety of innovative products, including a massive range of large format products. Easyflyer will enhance the Cimpress brand portfolio in France through its unique and differentiated “any thing to amaze the customer” approach.

Over time, Easyflyer’s products and operational capabilities will be integrated into our mass customization platform, and they will broaden their selection of products by leveraging the capabilities of MCP.

Fabien Pretre, CEO of Easyflyer, will continue in his role along with the Easyflyer senior management team. The team is excited to join Cimpress and about the opportunities this relationship will provide, including the opportunity to leverage our software and manufacturing expertise and our financial strength, while maintaining their distinct customer-focused brand, innovative products and focus on customers in their local market.

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